6 Ways to Improve Ad Relevance in your AdWords Campaign

Having high ad relevance can aid in increasing Quality Score, while simultaneously helping to give your Ad Rank a definite boost.
Ultimately, having a higher Quality Score can help you drive in more clicks with the same budget.

When optimizing a Google AdWords campaign, you can run into the unpleasant keyword status of “below average”, regarding ad relevance.

This usually occurs when your keywords and the content within your ad copy have very low relevance. This will negatively affect the overall user experience, since the query will not match the actual ad’s content. In the end, the ad ends up being irrelevant to the user’s search query.

Perhaps you have too many unrelated keywords in just one ad group and they are not tightly-themed. When this happens, the ads will not directly relate to the keywords and will not work to their fullest potential for your campaign.

The Google algorithm interprets this lack of relevance between your keywords and your ads as a negative consideration, and punishes you with a “below-average” level of ad relevance.

The good news is that in Google AdWords, keyword statuses can be easily identified when hovering your cursor over the speech bubble of each keyword.

Once a “below average” keyword is identified, it’s time to get to work to correct this problem before it negatively affects the performance of your campaign.

Remember, ad relevance is one of the main factors Google takes into consideration when calculating the Quality Score of your campaign’s keywords. Consequently, resolving this issue is of great importance since a lower Quality Score will result in lower Ad Rank and ultimately, more expensive clicks.

Here are six simple tips to improvingyour ads’ relevance:

1) Create Tightly-Themed Ad Groups with Only Related Keywords

It’s a good practice to create an individual ad group for each product or service you want to advertise. A good guideline is to have between 5-20 keywords, per ad group.

2) Make Sure your Ads are Closely Related to your Keywords

If your ad group’s name is “Fishing Gear”, make sure that only fishing gear-related keywords and close variants are included in it.

3) Write Text Ads that Include the Actual Keywords

One of the best practices is to include the main keyword in the ad title and in at least one of the description lines.

4) Don’t Get Too Creative

When writing compelling ads, we all want to be creative, but sometimes using fancy catch phrases in the ads’ titles and description lines can backfire on you. This happens when the words used in the ads are not the same as the keywords in the ad group.

5) Include a Main Keyword in the Display URL

If you have sufficient space, you could place a forward slash (/) at the end of the Website domain and then include a keyword in the display URL(i.e.: www.demo-page/Keyword-Here).

6) Choose the Right Landing Page and Exclude Missing Keywords

Always keep in mind that Google’s main concern is relevancy. Therefore, in order to have good ad relevance, the ad’s content must match the landing page’s content.

You can do this through creating specific landing pages for each of your ad groups. This is usually the recommended approach, as it allows you to be very specific in terms of ad relevancy.

Higher Ad Relevance = Higher Quality Score = Lower Cost-Per-Click

Improving ad relevance is well worth the effort, as it will result in an overall improvement in performance of your campaigns. By improving your relevance, your keywords will receive a higher Quality Score which will result in your ads showing in a higher ad position. Additionally, a higher Quality Score will translate to a lower cost-per-click, thus saving you money and allowing you to receive more clicks for a lower cost.

As you can see, improving ad relevancy in Google AdWords is a “Win-Win” situation, so let’s not waste any more time and let’s start optimizing!

Author: White Shark Media

White Shark Media is a leading Digital Marketing Agency that provides PPC Management to small and medium-sized businesses.